Any e-commerce consultant will tell you that the checkout process plays a big role in customer conversion rates. It needs to be simple, concise and easy to follow. If your customers get frustrated or confused with your checkout process, your customer conversion rates will suffer and so will your sales.

Here a few simple tricks to optimize your Miva Merchant checkout process.

Keep it Simple – Some of the best advice I can give you is to keep your checkout process simple. Make it as easy as possible to checkout. This means reduce clutter. Remove any elements which are not absolutely essential. Sometimes, depending on the design of the site I am working with, I like to remove the main left column on the checkout screens. This creates a very clean looking checkout, and also focuses all of the customer’s attention right to the information which really matters.

Don’t have a half page of instructions explaining to people how to checkout. If you need to do this, then something is wrong with your checkout process. The whole process should be self explanatory. If you do want to provide help for the less savvy internet users, provide a little help button, which opens a popup. This keeps all of the text out of the way and only users who want further help can use it. For a good example of this, take a look at http://www.ceriellofinefoods.com/

Use a Checkout Progress Bar – This lets your customers see right up front how many steps there are in your checkout process. They can easily go back a screen and they always know how many screens they have left. This is a great little tool to make your checkout process simple and easy. Miva doesn’t have one of these by default, so you are going to have to create it. Create 4 images for the 4 different checkout screens. Then in Miva, place the image at the top of the checkout screen. You can see a great example of a checkout progress bar at www.walleyedirect.com

Give Your Customers Their Shipping Rates Early – The checkout process really starts in the basket page. Most people shopping online want to know how much shipping is going to cost. Providing them this information right in the basket page, will greatly reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate.

This is also another reason I think most stores should be using flat rate shipping. Letting you customers know exactly what is going to cost to ship as early as possible really does help.

Emporium Plus makes a great little module called Mini-Basket Display, which allows you to display only the shipping costs on any page in Miva. It is a great module, and I highly recommend it.

Let Your Customers Know Your Checkout is Secure – People like to know that when they are entering their credit card information online, that it is safe and secure. Tell people that your site uses an SSL and show your SSL seal to increase customer confidence. Every little bit helps.

Track using Google Analytics – Google Analytics provides a great little tool called Goal Funnel Conversions. Once you set it up, you can see exactly how many people are completing your checkout process and also where there are leaving. This information allows you to fine tune your checkout process even further. You must be constantly tracking and fine tuning your store.

The checkout process is very important to the overall conversion rates on your store. Implementing these simple tricks will help you optimize your checkout process for your store.